The Growlery

"Sit down, my dear," said Mr. Jarndyce. "This, you must know, is the Growlery.
When I am out of humour, I come and growl here."

Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Chapter VIII

Sunday, April 03, 2011

Interesting Faces

My sister and I collect what we call 'interesting faces'. We point out people that we see at events or on the street to each other: "Did you see that girl's face?" "Yup, I saw. So awesome." Recently during intermission at a concert I waited, craning, for several minutes for a gangly teen boy whose face Krista had proclaimed interesting to turn around. I never did get more than a glimpse.

Amazingly, Krista and I have a high rate of agreement despite never having laid out rules or guidelines about what constitutes an interesting face. Instead we seem to have an intuitive recognition of such faces. For example, while watching the Band of Brothers miniseries, we were both entranced by the face of a young soldier in the opening credits.




It wasn't until several episodes into Band of Brothers that one of us mentioned 'the soldier with the interesting face', and we both knew exactly who was meant, to the astonishment of the rest of the family. You can see him in the foreground at ~1:49-1:52. As you can see there are a whole lot of soldiers in the intro, most of whom have very pleasing, interesting faces, including, in the background of the very same shot, Damien Lewis, the actor playing the main (awesome) character Lt. Winters.



In fact, I think Lewis also fits into 'interesting face' category, and that most really good movies have a wealth of actors with interesting faces, but but more on that later. What I want to know is how exactly is it that Krista and I both identified the same anonymous young soldier as having an interesting face? What exactly constitutes an interesting face?

Let's take a look at a couple examples of actors and actresses whose faces Krista and I agree are interesting and see if there are any commonalities.



Honeysuckle Weeks


Rosamund Pike


Stephen Campbell Moore


Joanne Froggatt


James McAvoy


Romola Garai


Joseph Gordon-Levitt


Leelee Sobieski


Anthony Howell


Anne-Marie Duff


Simon Wood


Claire Foy

I notice a couple commonalities here. Deep set 'squinty' eyes are common. The men tend to have good strong noses, and the women to have wider cheekbones or rounder faces than are typically considered the ideal. But that doesn't get us very far.

Being actors and actresses they are of course a good looking bunch, with nice symmetrical, regular features. In fact, you might reasonably ask if Krista and I don't have a taste for people with interesting faces, so much as we have a taste for people with beautiful faces (which although totally natural is not particularly worth investigating).

However, consider the many beautiful people who don't make the interesting faces cut: actresses like Keira Knightly, Megan Fox, Penelope Cruz, Julia Roberts, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lopez, Natalie Portman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, or actors like Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, George Clooney, James Franco, Matthew McConaughey, Patrick Dempsey, Jude Law, and Jake Gyllenhaal.* Conventionally good looking I'll grant you (for most of them); interesting faces, not so much. Women in this sample tend to have thin oval faces with pronounced cheekbones and large eyes. The men vary a bit more but all seem to have some 'rugged' features such as a craggy brow and the traditionally strong jaw expected of a leading man. For an exemplar for these types consider Jon Hamm and January Jones of Mad Men fame.



See what I mean? Rugged good looks for Jon and a thin oval face with cheekbones for January. Given that they were cast to exemplify 1950s male and female beauty, I'd say that they do a pretty amazing job demonstrating the beauty ideals of today. But these ideals are rather boring if you ask me, so perhaps what we mean by beautiful faces is that they are beautiful faces that don't fit the cultural standard of beauty: too angular a face, too prominent a nose, too light of eyebrows, too round a face.

So Theory 1 for the existence of our 'interesting' categorization is reaction. Krista and I are reacting against the dominant and rather unimaginative standard of beauty, attempting to broaden the definition. For example our affection for rounder faces might be a reaction to the widespread favoritism for women with oval faces. If you need proof of this trend just check out this Justin Beiber music video -- they cast a girl with a thin, oval face as Justin's love interest in spite of the fact that the girl's sidekick has a way more interesting round face. You can catch glimpses of this girl (wearing white) at second 13, 16, 20 (and throughout the video, but I assume that you don't want to watch any more of it than you have to). Another piece of evidence in favor of this theory is the fact that many of the actors and actresses we consider interesting come from foreign films or period dramas--two venues that are also relatively reactive to the dominant culture's trends and beauty standards.

Or perhaps it's not that intentional, perhaps Krista and I, in our small community, have simply developed a consistent taste for a particular look.



If so, we wouldn't be the first. Take a look at the above photo of Sam, Milner and Foyle from Foyle's War (that is to say Honeysuckle Weeks, Anthony Howell and Michael Kitchen). Note that they all have similar faces, in particular, deep set 'squinty' eyes. Foyle's War is another prime location for finding interesting faces, but the actors often share have these similar eyes, including Foyle's son Andrew, not pictured here. But the three pictured above are not supposed to be related to each other, so I think what has happened here is that the director or casting agent (or both) has developed a taste for people with squinty eyes. So Theory 2 is a the development of a local aesthetic.

Or, Theory 3, perhaps we imprinted on people with round faces with squinty eyes.



Take a look at this picture of Krista and me, and you can probably spot a motive for wanting to elevate the squinty eyed, round face beauty ideal. Perhaps in finding these interesting faces we've actually been seeing and being attracted to resemblances to ourselves and our family.

But I tend to favor Theory 4, that we're really on to something here and have had the luck to stumble upon the Platonic form of the beautiful.

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*All very unscientifically selected from various 'hottest' and 'sexiest' lists floating around the Internet.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Mackerel Sky, Ltd. said...

Theory 4, definitely!

10:52 PM  

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